Dostoyevsky and Modern Russian Literature

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DOSTOYEVSKY AND MODERN RUSSIAN
LITERATURE

Only rarely does an author appear in any literature of such
transcendent importance that all later work, whether by friends
or foes, whether of the same or opposing schools, must take
account of him and in one form or another must follow and
imitate him. Such a giant is Dostoyevsky, and he, far more
than either of the two other great Russian writers of the nineteenth
century, has left his mark on the works of his successors.

Turgenev, with his masterly descriptions of the nests of nobles
and their large estates, is now an author of the past. Long be-
fore the Revolution the country life which he describes had
withered away and the spirit of those days had fled. Even his
intellectual revolutionists no longer hold the centre of the stage.
The stern fact of the Revolution soon swept away the Rudins
and the other delightful chatterers, true prototypes of large num-
bers of Russian intellectuals, as Chaykovsky sadly remarked in his
speech at the centennial of the birth of Turgenev at Archangel
in 191 8.

Tolstoy, with his moral belief that force lies at the root of all
evil in the world, may be praised by the twentieth century, but
the age has not followed him. His anarchism has succeeded in
undermining governments everywhere, but his doctrine of love
has not exerted a corresponding influence on the great mass of
humanity. The problem of life is too complex to admit of so
simple a solution. As a result, he is praised rather than imitated,
and later literature has not followed him and his philosophy as
widely in Russia as perhaps in other countries.

At first it would seem that the influence of Dostoyevsky
would be even less. Fate, with bitter irony, has jested at his
formless novels, in which he repeats and repeats his conviction
that Russia will never rise against the Tsar, that socialism
will never gain a foothold in Russia, and that the Russian peas-
ant will be forever devoted to the Orthodox Church and the
Russian government. Then came 1917. The last of the Rom-

Dostoyevsky and Modern Russian Literature 287

anovs died an unknown death in prison, and an era of persecu-
tian for the Church commenced. And yet the works of Dos-
toyevsky live. Why? It is not for their historical accuracy.
Dostoyevsky did not bother about that. It is not for their
exquisite form. There is hardly one of his works which can satisfy
the most elementary canons of art, and the poor epileptic had no
time or energy to revise his work with the care and industry of
a Tolstoy. It is not for their tender delineation of the humble.
It is only the least known works of our author which deal with
the honest poor. Creatures, warped and misshapen morally and
physically, are the subjects of his greater novels, and these, it
would seem, could attract little more than a morbid interest.

Yet Dostoyevsky is read and read widely. He is read for his
psychological analyses of the abnormal ; he is read for the evi-
dent sympathy which he has with these poor beings ; and, above
all, he is read for the kinship which he shows with later authors.
The entire Neo-romantic School of Russia is to a surprising
degree built upon the foundations laid by Dostoyevsky, even
when he thought that a far different superstructure was to be
erected upon them. It may be of interest, then, to consider
some few of the points in which the writings of Dostoyevsky
anticipate or have influenced the work of the more modern
Russian authors, even those who have been working since 191 7.

First of all we must mention the interest in the abnormal.
The indictment literature of the middle of the century — novels
written with the purpose of helping in the liberation of Russia —
does not deal with the abnormal. The older literature took as
its hero the superfluous man, the man without purpose or will
in life, some Pechorin or Evgeny Onyegin, or, in a more striking
example, Oblomov, the hero of Goncharov's great novel, and the
the classic example of the type. Another type is the repentant
nobleman, voluntarily giving up his privileges to help his op-
pressed brethren. Bazarov in Turgenev's Fathers and Children,
and Nekhlyudov in Tolstoy's Resurrection, are of this class. It is
hardly possible to find among them such a hero as Dostoyevsky
presents, but since his day, there is hardly an author, certainly
among the symbolists, as Bryusov, Sologub, and Andreyev, who
does not feel himself drawn to a study of the insane, the sick, or the

288 The Sewanee Review

afflicted in body, mind and soul. Eleazer or Judas Iscariot of
Andreyev can find their comrades in Shatov in The Possessed ox
Smerdyakov or Ivan Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov.

Then, again, during the nineteenth century Russian literature
was essentially rural. Turgenev and Tolstoy loved the country.
The noble lived on his estates and spent the social seasons in the
capitals, but he rarely learned to know or love the people of
the city. Life for Turgenev passes on the estate or abroad in
some gay watering-place. To Tolstoy the city was the negation of
Christianity, a blot on the world, a subject for sociological
studies rather than for literature. Dostoyevsky, however, was
born and brought up in the city ; he knew the hopes and fears,
the ambitions and the failures of its people, and he described
what he knew. Raskolnikov, the Karamazovs, Myshkir, all live
in the city. There is hardly one of Dostoyevsky's great works
that is not laid in the city, save the Memoirs of a Dead House,
the account of the Siberian prisons, compared to which even a
city is a luxury. Where, as in The Possessed, part of the scene
is laid in the country, there the final catastrophe is caused by
the strike of the factory workers and every act is viewed from
its connection with the life of the provincial capital.

During the last half century the centre of Russian literature
has abruptly shifted. The nests of nobles have disappeared.
Bunin, in The Village, has given us the country as he sees it, — a
fearful, empty place. The peasants are dull and brutish. For
Muyzhel they are mere clods, suffering and dying like beasts in
their dens, with nothing to brighten or cheer their painful exist-
ence. Gone is the joy of labor, so well set forth in the folk-
poems of Koltsov. Gone are happiness, honor, everything but
a miserable gnawing of discontent. It is the city worker, the
townsman, that holds the key to the future, as Veresayev and
his fellow-realists point out. The symbolists also under the
leadership of Bryusov have turned in the same direction. In
his poems the whirr of the airplane, the hum of the motor, and
the cramping life of the city are fully reflected. Yet in The
Answer he declares boldly that the same passions and the same
torments inflame the human heart as in the days of Dido and
that we are still the slaves of the same unsparing Aphrodite.

Dostoyevsky and Modern Russian Literature 289

This change has taken place in life as in literature, since the
present regime in Russia is founded chiefly on the cities, with a
constant struggle against the peasantry and the agricultural
classes.

This development has been accompanied by an increasing
callousness in literature. Stephen Graham 1 says of Bryusov
that he is a hard, polished, and even merciless personality, and
has little in common with the compassionate spirits of Russia.
He is not alone. Artsybashev in Sanin proposes a mode of life
which is purely egotistic and thoroughly scornful of sympathy.
His doctrine is entirely selfish. We should hardly err in ascrib-
ing this same sentiment to the bosyak of Gorky, the bare-footed
ruffian, who figures in many of his stories. Surely this cannot
touch the influence of Dostoyevsky, the most Christian soul in
centuries, as many of his admirers have asserted.

Nevertheless, Dostoyevsky is less different than we might be
led to think. Callousness is interwoven with a vein of cruelty
in many of his characters, as Raskolnikov in Crime and Punish-
ment. He will give his last ruble to insure a proper funeral for
Marmeladov, the drunken and worthless official, but he is a
murderer, and he works out the doctrine of the superman (this in
1866). He divides all men into two classes — those who are
under the law and those who are above the law. The latter
are justly exempted from the petty restrictions and the moral
regulations which exist for lesser personalities. A Napoleon
on his way to a splendid goal can and must sacrifice whatever
crosses his path and thwarts his sovereign will. If this be true,
why should a man worry if his duty to humanity urges him to
kill a money-lender, a bloodsucker, a louse, as Raskolnikov
proudly explains ? Needless to say, the poor student is not a
superman. He acknowledges his failure, begs pardon of Mother
Earth, and gives himself up to the authorities ; but the principle
is enunciated. The evil is done and we can understand why
Nietzsche declared that from Dostoyevsky alone could he learn
psychology. If Raskolnikov argues himself into this belief, Ivan
Karamazov uses his theories of duty and rights to rouse Smer-

1 The Republic of the Southern Cross, p. v.

! 9

290 The Sewanee Review

dyakov to murder his supposed father. He preaches to him in
season and out of season until the poor wretch fails to distinguish
right from wrong and strikes out blindly. Ivan is throughout a
master of egotism, of selfishness, a cold and calculating intellect,
a menacing type hardly to be expected of the teacher of humil-
ity. The Idiot shows us still another picture of a soul-destroying
passion. Myshkin, with his love and spiritual insight, cannot
calm the fires of rage that blaze in the breast of Rogozhin and
the equally unrestrained impulses of Nastasia. The terrible
results of egotism in the novels are so marked that we are
tempted to imagine a vein of cruelty scarcely hidden in Dos-
toyevsky himself. His interest in crimes of unprecedented
ferocity is confirmed again by his careful analyses of several
cases of the most shocking brutality in The Journal of a Writer,
his own experiment in journalism.

It is, however, in The Possessed that he gives us the most
striking example of the lengths to which insane ambition can
goad a man. Here Nikolay Stavrogin is the superman. Every-
one loves him, but only to be sneered at, insulted, outraged.
Shatov, his wife, Darya, Kirillov, all are the victims of his cold
and unfeeling personality. Beside him stands his worse self,
Petr Stepanovich Verkhnovensky, also cold and unfeeling, petty
in his fiendishness, merciless even as compared with his greater
friend. He is a revolutionist, not for ideals, but for Ivan
Tsarevich, for Stavrogin, the superman, the conqueror of tsars,
the lord of lords, as he cynically declares. Once the revolution
is over and all government is dethroned, then a new and
more lasting structure will be erected and "it is we, we alone
who are to be the builders". It is to Stavrogin that every peas-
ant, every man, every citizen of Russia is to look as the author
of the new and better life which is to come at last. It is use-
less for critics of a liberal stamp to sneer at this book as the
representation of the dregs of the revolutionary movement in
Russia, and a slander on a noble people. Dostoyevsky has set
himself to describe the fiendish power which an unscrupulous
and ambitious man may have over his fellows, even in the pursuit
of a relatively low goal. Well it is for any country in revolt, if
some at least of its leaders do not develop the egotism of Stavrogin

Dostoyevsky and Modern Russian Literature 291

and his friend, and try to substitute their power for the rule which
they have overthrown. In all these Dostoyevsky is the ancestor
of the cold and cynical Ableukhov of Byely's Peterburg, and
other works of the modern school.

The extreme authors of the Russian Revolution have gone to
such great lengths in their union of Christ and the people that
their works are regarded by pious and conventional Christians as
blasphemous. Blok in The Twelve describes a Red patrol
marching through the city streets on a winter evening and at
their head Christ with a red flag and crowned with roses. Even
more clearly does Byely confuse Christ and the people in a
mystical union. This may seem quite at variance with the ideas of
Dostoyevsky, but we must read The Possessed to find danger-
ously similar conceptions. Read the strange dialogue between
the half-crazed Shatov and the superman Stavrogin. Shatov con-
fesses his belief in Russia, in Russia as the body of Christ in Ortho-
doxy, and by a supreme effort he declares that he will believe in
God. Will believe in God ! This he supplements with Stavrogin's
speculations on the relations between God and the State : —

"There was never a time when all or many nations had
one universal God, but each nation always had its own deity.
It is the mark of the annihilation of nationality, when gods
begin to be universal. . . . When gods become universal,
the gods die and faith in them along with the nations. The

stronger a nation the more distinct will be its god

Every nation has its own conceptions of good and evil and
its own particular evil and good."

Again and again in this conversation Shatov declares that a
nation is the body of God. He repeats again and again that
Russia is a God-carrier, a special incarnation of the supreme
Deity. When Stavrogin objects that Shatov is reducing God to
an attribute of nationality, Shatov replies: "No, I am raising
nationality to the level of God". What is this but a denial of
the brotherhood of man, a sort of blind nationalism? The
enemies of Germany spoke during the war of the German god,
a nationalistic phenomenon based perhaps on the old Teutonic
mythology, but Dostoyevsky was a sponsor for this view, as his
works foreshadow the superman that knows no law.

292 The Sewanee Review

Closely akin to this discussion of God and the nation is the
problem of God and the individual. Here again The Possessed
presents some striking conceptions. Let us think for a moment
of Kirillov, with his views of the God-man and the Man-God.
Which is it to be? Or the plaintiveness of his conception of
Christ, the only Man who could make life worth while and He
unable to conquer death? Or the division of the world into the
period before and after the annihilation of God and humanity's
rise to godhood ? These few cases will show us some of the
many turns which the genius of Dostoyevsky takes in its voy-
ages into the unknown.

This same search for God is the distinguishing mark of the
Neo-romantic movement in Russia. It is the theme of the philoso-
pher Solovyev. It is the underlying conception of Merezhkovsky,
appearing not merely in his poetry and essays but in his criti-
cal writings on Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, and above all in his
great trilogy of Christ and Antichrist. Here we have three
long novels, The Death of the Gods, the career of Julian the
Apostate, the last of the worshippers of the spirit of Greece in the
pagan world ; The Resurrection of the Gods, the career of Leo-
nardo da Vinci ; and Peter and Alexis, the great reformer of Russia
and his ill-fated son. Merezhkovsky seeks a synthesis of Christ
and Antichrist, but his work, despite its millennial range, finds
itself still unable to effect the mystic union. This search for God
underlies the quiet beauty of Zaytsev; it torments the fantasy
of Andreyev. It shines in all of his symbolical dramas. These
works do not reflect Christianity, they are not swayed by its
dreams or dismayed by its frowns. They represent a strange
union of mysticism and scepticism, a union which attained a
large following in Russia during the early years of the twentieth
century. It is unfortunate that we could not have Dostoyevsky's
opinion on many of them. He might frown upon many of their
ideas, but he himself was much closer to them in spirit than his
reputation would lead us to suspect.

This mystical motive is not a distinguishing mark of the earlier
Russian literature. It is lacking in Tolstoy. His love for the
Sermon on the Mount shines in all the later works of the great
thinker, but religiously he avoids mystery and the supernatural.

Dostoyevsky and Modern Russian Literature 293

He carries this so far that in his summaries of the Gospels he
ignores all save the teachings of Christ, and declares that he
would welcome the proof that Christ had no historical existence
so that devotion to the person of Christ might not turn at-
tention from the greatness of His teachings, which are at bottom
one with the other great religions of the world. This rationalism is
far from the passionate search for God, for the supernatural ; from
the vague, indefinite and often maimed cry of Dostoyevsky. The
writings of Turgenev show that he also was unmoved by such
yearnings. Neither orthodoxy nor any form of religious faith
stirs the heart of any of his characters save Liza in The Nest of
Nobles. There are mysticism and spiritism of a sort in Klara
Milich, but they are very crude when we compare them with the
faith of Dostoyevsky, and resemble the tricks of the medium far
more than the sincere faith of the believer. The indictment litera-
ture and the great critics of the century know nothing of it, and
we must go back to the romantic period before we find anything
with which we may safely compare Dostoyevsky.

With this spirit in mind we are not surprised to find that Dos-
toyevsky was an admirer of Pushkin. Such critics as Byelin-
sky cast scorn on the great poet. They ridiculed Evgeny
Onyegin and Tatyana, and sought how they might best diminish
his fame. They elaborated the theory of the social value of
litarature to enable them to jeer at the great poet who wrote for
beauty and not for politics. During the middle of the century
Russian poetry was practically non-existent. Fet was silenced
and Nekrasov sought to turn his muse exclusively to the social
problems of his day, although he fortunately was unable to limit
himself as strictly as he wished. Again and again in his longer
works, as Who Lives Well in Russia, the poet masters the politi-
cian and bursts into real poetry. The Pushkin speech of 1880
is a landmark in the history of Russian literature. In this Dos-
toyevsky declared in bold and direct language that Pushkin
was an adornment of Russian literature and one of its greatest
masters. Poetry revived about this time and the newer authors,
as Nadson, even in their social strains include a mystic touch
which shows clearly the influence of the great novelist. The
later poets, the Symbolists — Balmont, Bryusov, Ivanov and

294 Th e Sewanee Review

their circles — return to Dostoyevsky, they return to Pushkin,
to Baratynsky, and to Lermontov, to the entire Romantic period
of the twenties and thirties, when poets were free to serve beauty
and to withdraw from the stern realities of life into a more beau-
tiful and peaceful mysticism.

Closely related to this is the recrudescence of Slavophilism.
Gogol and the Aksakovs had fought for the old traditions of Rus-
sia, only to be chastised by the proud and self-confident Wes-
terners. In the hands of its great masters, this theory was not a
slavish worship of the abuses and tyrannical practices of the Rus-
sian government, but a mystic and pious dream that Russia could
emancipate herself from the materialism and force of the West
and live her own life on the lines which she had laid out centu-
ries before. It even rendered itself an object of suspicion to
the government through its repudiation of the reforms of Peter
and his Europeanized court. Into this current of thought Dos-
toyevsky fitted easily. His visit to the West, to England and
France, in 1862, described in Winter Reminiscences of Summer
Travels, shows how thoroughly he was disillusioned in any love
which he might have had for the West. The cold protestantism of
England and the selfishness of the bourgeoisie of France showed
him that even liberty, equality and fraternity would be of little
service if the will to love and peace did not exist in the hearts
of men. Scattered passages show the influence which he felt
from Asia, and in The Journal of a Writer he gives us his last
word. In the final number, which appeared after his death, he ac-
cepts the Asiatic policy of Russia and urges his people to turn
from Europe and identify themselves with the great lands of
the East.

This willingness to look at Asia is a marked characteristic of
many of the modern authors. It is the basis for the remarka-
ble movement known as Scythism, named after a poem of Blok
in which he openly declares that the Russians are not Europeans,
and that if their demands are not heard, they will turn to the
East, — and woe to Europe ! AndreyByely announced a trilogy on
this conflict of Europe and Asia within Russia. Only the first
two parts were written — The Silver Dove and Peterburg. The
first deals with the mysticism of the peasants who belong to

Dostoyevsky and Modern Russian Literature 295

the mysterious sect of doves and describes the collapse of the
young scholar who turns to them for mystical development, only
to become ensnared in their meshes. He tries to escape, but
the sectarians in their blind fanaticism follow him and kill him
rather than have him do so. Peterburg has as its hero Ableukhov,
a direct descendant of the Khan Ab-Lei, a cold and menacing
bureaucrat of the old regime. Shishfarne and Enfarshish, the
Persian, hold up a constant menace to Russia, and the brazen
statue of Peter the Great gallops to the rescue of his threatened
city exactly as in The Copper Rider of Pushkin a century before.
The thesis is placed boldly in this novel: Is the Asia of Christ
or the Asia of Genghis Khan to conquer in Russia f Whichever
wins, the victory is Asiatic. Others of the Bolshevik poets are
as outspoken in their orientation. Mariengof calls upon the
hordes of Asia to sweep into Europe to take vengeance on the
conquerors of Stenka Razin and Pugachev, two of the foremost
peasant leaders in the struggle against the introduction of West-
ern ideas into Russia. Oryeshin in Revolt glories in the dark-
cheeked Chinese hordes swarming through the Urals to deal
vengeance on a decadent civilization, and he boldly declares
that in the new world the blessing is to be awarded to the Kirg-
hiz nomads of the steppes.

We cannot discuss here the source of many of Dostoyevsky's
ideas. In many cases they are to be sought among the sim-
ple peasantry and the sectarian leaders of Russian dissent
rather than in higher spheres of society and learning. These
sides of the Russian people had been carefully obscured and
derided by the Westerners. Russian literature served a long
apprenticeship under Byelinsky and his followers who had sought
to transplant Western culture and aspirations and acclimate
them in Russia. In the days when it was a civic duty which
every educated man owed his country to read the latest novel on
social problems, Dostoyevsky with his passionate criticisms was
an anomaly. His spiritual message and his fierce attacks on
socialists and radicals cut strangely across the prevailing fashion.
Pisemsky, far less daring, had been punished with ostracism,
and The Troubled Sea represents the radicals as futile rather
than evil. Even Turgenev never recovered from the ill-will

296 The Sewanee Review

which he had gained in return for Fathers and Children and
Virgin Soil. He was regarded as a traitor to the cause of lib-
erty, and this sad fate, together with his increasing illness, silenced
his pen. Not so with Dostoyevsky. Whether he were attack-
ing revolutionists or defending his pitiful creatures, he went his
way embittered perhaps, but never bending before the storm,
and he triumphed.

It was a bitter day for the Russian intelligentsia when they
saw the success of their inveterate foe. They had welcomed his
early works, Poor Folk and The Oppressed and Humiliated; they
had used the Memoirs from a Dead House as material for the
study of Siberian prisons, but the later works were slighted.
Even in histories of Russian literature prepared in English they
could not judge calmly. Kropotkin in his Ideals and Reali-
ties in Russian Literature heaps on Dostoyevsky enough denun-
ciation to break a lesser author. He regards him as utterly
unreadable save for some passages marked by sympathy for the
poor. Bruckner more impartially acknowledges his power, but
sneers at his grovelling before Byzantine orthodoxy and Mon-
golian autocracy. He tries to show that Dostoyevsky, the
deep psychologist, could not depict the upper types of revolu-
tionists, although he could plunge into the abysses of the hearts
and souls of the most abnormal. Tolstoy is said to have judged
him by his pre-Siberian works. In the words of Vyekhi, one of
the publications of the symbolists, the intelligentsia hated to
acknowledge him, but ultimately they were brought to accept
him whom they had scorned.

Dostoyevsky was accepted by all classes of Russians and by
world literature. More than that, the Neo-romantic period which
followed him was essentially a period of post-Dostoyevsky litera-
ture. The adherents of the old schools carried on a strong propa-
ganda against the new, stronger perhaps than in any other coun-
try, for it was a struggle not merely between two schools of art
but between art and politics. Even to-day it is possible to find
educated Russians who berate all literature which has not an
intensely practical bearing, and prefer an author of indictment
literature to a greater master who regards his art as art. Never-
theless, the triumph of Dostoyevsky was so complete that he

Dostoyevsky and Modern Russian Literature 297

may be said to have given the keynote of the period since
1880. Certainly, his works contain most of the chords which
have been struck since that time. Despised and impoverished
as he was in life, his spirit may now feel content, as he realizes
his growing influence and the overshadowing control which he
has exercised over modern Russian literature.

Clarence Augustus Manning.
Columbia University.